An Allegory of Now

When I first read She Who Is Alive, it seemed to be just the kind of craziness I love, in this case a wonderful insane neo-fascist world filled with the heady precognitions of those who purport to have the truth, and where those truths might actually be the truth. Such joy I felt contemplating such a ridiculous world, where up is down and sideways is the other sideways. Sure, I mean, we've always had believed-in craziness of many types - religions oft being my favorite source, one I could cuddle with at night whilst the children slept - and we've had, in the previous centuries, the upside-downiness of the Stalins and the Vatican and, well, now that I think of it, it actually happens an awful lot. And it now seems that it's back in fashion, like hair wraps and bellbottom jeans. And the kowtows have begun, the politicians polishing their rubber stamps lest they end up a person of interest or audit.  

So do we still laugh, like our buddy Daniil Kharms, who laughed while starving to death and force-psychiatrized, or do we scramble into our false bottom coal sheds, hoping to not be found by the side-looking radar pointed down at us by balloon and aircraft and (dare I say it?) some future generation linked-starlike space objects?  For now, I push this film along, knowing that it may be used against me, although luckily so far off their aforementioned radar that it seems unlikely I will be lined up against the wall.  But, if it happens that this happens, I will boldly smoke that last cigarette, refuse the blindfold, and at the last moment call on them to shoot straight, blow them a kiss, and strike off to meet our makers. 

Daphnes Garten

I agreed to a request from Austria for another opera: Daphnes Garten, a co-commission from Gerhard Lehner of the Klagenfurter Ensemble and Peter Wagner of the Offenes Haus Oberwart, which will tour in November through December. While it is now almost done, and it is beautiful, the composition of it has been a stress-inducing sleep-depriving nightmare, as it was intermingled with my ongoing day job as an Executive Scientist® and the continuing filming of She Who Is Alive.

This opera, by my count my sixth in German, is a dreamy telling of the story of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Maltese journalist who brought to light corruption throughout Europe. Receiving hundreds of thousands of emails, she was the nexus, the go-to contact for all things corrupt, and what she found was later all supported - and more - by the Panama Papers leak, until one morning when she was shredded in a car bomb explosion. The two assassins - two brothers - one who watched and one who sat on his boat texting the bomb's code sequence REL1=on., have been imprisoned, and some up the chain have faced some consequences, but at the top, not so much. 

After her death, her husband said "The more frustrated Daphne grew at the state of our country, the more beautiful our garden became," and the garden throughout is a touchstone of the beauty that still is to be found even when the honorable men do their best to destroy everything.

The libretto, by the Austrian playwright Katharina Tiwald, is by turns high-comedy and heart-wrenching.  I can't read the end of it, where we hear a roll call of the dead, without crying, and especially the line "The good that women do lives after them. I have done my best to write music that is manipulative and shredding in its own way.  

I'm polishing it up now, sending it off to the Austrians along with the usual Erling-as-German-Bing-Crosby singing all the parts so the director can plan it out before the instruments and singers arrive in a few weeks.  To my fans it may be of interest that one of these recordings exists for every one of my operas - all quite horrifying, but charming.  

Greater America

Had dinner with my dear friend and librettist Jacobus Byssus Zanomensis and his lovely and talented wife V_M_ last night. As usual, talk turned to the German Question and how close our American Empire is keeling towards fascist imperialist disaster. On their last trip to the banks of the Meuse, one of his good German friends reminded him of the second stanza of the German National Hymn, which during the Great Hole of Modern Germany History was more or less the only stanza, topped off with a bit of this and that about shooting dead the enemies of the SA, but the section of interest runs as follows:

Von der Maas bis an die Memel,
Von der Etsch bis an den Belt.

meaning that the borders of the true Germany run from the Meuse River (more or less OK) to the Memel River (which, ahem, is way past Poland) to the Adige River (which would give Germany a nice warm water port in the Adriatic) to the strait of the Little Belt (which might require slaughtering a few troublesome people to the North who voted the wrong way in the Schleswig Plebiscites).

Of course, the concept of a border is a bit quaint in these days where the skies are filled with drones piloted by young brainwashed boys with close haircuts enforcing the limitless extent of the American Empire, part of a troubling stew into which we pour a bit of joblessness, hopelessness, rampant Fundamentalist and Patriotic pseudo religion, served up hot with Hellfire missiles, not to mention the heavy trod of the shock troops of the capitalist hordes, kevlar replaced by power tie.

Ruth's Kosher Vegetarian Restaurant

We had several great meals in Florence. First was a traditional Bistecca alla Fiorentina and the second was just around the corner from the synagogue (above) at Ruth's Kosher Vegetarian Restaurant.  The former because of the enormity both in mass and taste and the second because the owner regaled us with stories of his days in Prague in the bad old days of the Soviet repression: how he hung out with Vaclav Havel (he had a book of photos of the two of them and various other hippie types), about the Plastic People of the Universe (including where they all are now), about the Velvet Underground (and how the Velvet Revolution was named after them), about the importance of Frank Zappa to their culture, about how they carried copies of the White Album with a label peeled off a Smetana LP, and how the best Milos Forman film is Taking Off.  

Torture of the damned

Mother Jones published an interesting object, seen below.  It purports to be the music of the twist and the  screw: our tax dollars payed out for the most genteel of purposes. It reminded me of Gavin Bryars explanation for self-publishing, to keep control over his works so they wouldn't be performed in the then-pariah state of apartheid South Africa.  I can't imagine Rage Against the Machine - especially - being too happy about their inclusion on this list. Music, like any other form of torture, should be applied only to those who request it of you. Even though I, like most right-minded™ folks, believe that information wants to be free, I do think it is a somewhat naive misunderstanding of the value of author's rights, even moral rights, to think that it is all about BitTorrent-ing the latest episode of Project Runway. In fact, the greatest threat could be your government or the big bad corporations stealing your artistic handiwork to use for nefarious purposes, from the selling to unthinking consumers the means of their own destruction to the hired scourgers of our various Ministries of Justice, Peace and Defense using it to destroy some poor schmuck who happened to piss off the wrong tribal elder when the company fellows started doling out greenbacks for information. And I have some fear for my friend Frieder, whose performance previous to my opera this spring will be in Pakistan. Will his Pakistani visa's presence on his Old Europe passport land him a lengthy stay in a Navy brig, with cold iron manacles and cold iron door that even his most earnest magic cannot pass through, listening to the Barney Theme Song until he confesses to a host of misdeeds?